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How To Improve at Writing
Another article I'd written that may help or motivate.
**Section 1: Reaching Average**
You can rapidly become average at writing, at least functionally. The key is embracing technology. Anyone who has examined job applications before and after AI will know that few people write better than AI, and this is now. AI will improve.
All it takes to write at an average standard is to list the points you want to make, get AI to present these coherently, and then quickly proofread and correct any misunderstood points or blatant errors.
Few people need to write better than this baseline. You can also cheaply outsource any writing that could prove critical, including dating profiles and job applications.
Even if you believe you will never need to become a great writer, we recommend spending five minutes reading the next section.
**Section 2: The Core Rules of Writing**
**Rule 1: Thought matters.**
We recommend you focus your thoughts by asking yourself questions. “Does a particular sentence serve a purpose?” or “What plot elements should you include in a political thriller?”
As thinking is time-consuming, we recommend first asking yourself if what you are writing matters. If it doesn’t, the method described in section 1 is sufficient.
To think through everything, even for a two-word advertising slogan, is time-consuming. For longer pieces, compromise is a requirement. As such, it is crucial to know what to focus on.
When writing something where the quality matters, we suggest you ask yourself or others:
* Are there blatant errors? Bad writing loses people quickly.
* What is the initial Impression my work will make? Many people will immediately stop reading anything that doesn’t make a strong impact.
* Does what I’m writing address its purpose? Common primary purposes of writing include making your audience feel or the quick and professional conveyance of information.
**Rule 2: Aim to make your audience feel as you intend.** To achieve this, you must know which reaction you want.
An everyday email to your boss should convey competence. It should typically be direct, brief, clear, polite, and avoid errors. Almost all great novels evoke wonder; you want your audience to read and think wow, that was a great experience. Most novels will aim to help you empathize with the characters and use this empathy to convey emotions.
**Rule 3: Learn what excellent writing looks like.** It is essential to read writing similar to what you aim to write.
Ideally, you should dissect what you read to evaluate what you might use, why the author made the choices they made, and what the strengths and weaknesses are. If you cannot accurately spot significant flaws in a piece of writing, you will unlikely improve upon it. This skill will also help when you edit and evaluate your own work.
One way to learn this skill is to read analytical writing, ideally writing that analyzes something you have already read, as high-quality reviews should. Another strong method is to examine your writing and, ideally, get feedback.
**Section 3: The Path to Mastery**
It would take more than a lifetime to explain everything a master writer might consider, and most of this information would duplicate the work of others. Instead, we’ve designed this section to teach you how to become a master writer efficiently.
The primary activity to improve your writing is, of course, writing. However, most adults will improve slowly by this method alone. To improve more rapidly, you need to practice purposefully.
If you are unfamiliar with purposeful practice, we strongly recommend the book *Peak* by Anders Ericson and Robert Pool. Briefly, purposeful practice involves thought, ideally thought targeted toward improvement.
For example, when someone learns to type, they are forced to think about the activity. Most adults, however, know how to type well enough that they do not need to think about it. As such, they stop improving. Every adult could improve their typing speed, but few do. This is because they don’t think about their typing. Focus on your typing, and it should improve. Two easy methods to do this are simply typing as fast as you are able or using a website’s typing exercises.
Focus is needed to improve all elements of your writing. This focus doesn’t need to occur as you write; you can achieve it through reviews or feedback. The best way to improve your writing will be to have people of similar or greater skill levels read your writing and discuss the points that arise. Slightly worse but still beneficial is to read the works of others and discuss how to improve. Another worse but easier-to-achieve method is to see what changes AI suggests.
To improve rapidly, we recommend that you first work on writing well in a general sense. As your pace of improvement slows, focus on more specific aspects of this skill, such as grammar, writing rapidly, specificity (using the correct words in a situation), or writing style. Eventually, return to the overarching topic armed with extra knowledge that should help you progress further and continue to delve into each topic in deeper detail. To aid you, we’ve broken writing into its more critical subskills:
Technical skills
* Grammar
* Sentence structure
* Spelling
* Punctuation
* Sentence structure
* Syntax awareness
* Consistency
* Repeated word use
Beautiful/quality writing
* Vocabulary
* Specificity
* Metaphor, alliteration, and simile
* Rhyme and rhythm
* Impact
* Writing style
* Creativity
* Idea generation
* Injecting emotion
Writing with purpose
* Targeting your audience
Writing rapidly
* Typing speed
* Planning (quick tip: it is often easier to write by answering questions)
* Discipline (or time spent writing)
* Breaking tasks into manageable steps
* Time management for deadlines
Editing and review
* Copy editing
* Structural editing
* Cutting unneeded words
* Review
* Generating and using the feedback of others
* Fact-checking and other research
Storytelling
* Character
* Dialog
* Character arcs
* Personality
* Making the audience empathize with your characters
* Internal monolog
* Scenes
* Immersion
* Worldbuilding
* Plot
* Techniques, for example, Show, don’t tell
* Determining which details to include
* Generating intrigue
* Foreshadowing
* Symbolism, themes, and subtext
Business writing
* Speeches
* Teaching others
* Marketing
* Academic writing
Layout
The more times you return to a subject, the more overlap you will experience and the slower you should learn. As such, it is worth confirming that you want to improve further rather than working on another aspect of your life.
While you should often evaluate and attempt to improve all aspects of your writing concurrently, working on specific areas of your craft sometimes makes sense. To work on style, for example, you may rewrite a scene in the plain writing style famously associated with Issac Asimov, in a poetic style, or as a foreigner or aristocrat.
Our next quick point is that you can improve at every writing sub-skill. The main area here that people dispute is creativity. The argument against learning creativity hinges on the belief that creativity is innate. This argument has some merit. Some people develop more or better creative ideas in less time than others. In other words, they are more innovative.
Acknowledging individual differences in starting points, learning rates, and potential limitations, such as age or physique, does not discount the possibility of improvement. Although I could never play in the NBA, I could still significantly enhance my basketball skills; similarly, you can progress in creativity.
**Resources**
In addition to exercises, we’ve suggested the following resources that may be helpful:
* *Stein on Writing* by Sol Stein
* *Writing Excuses*: A podcast that covers almost everything to do with fiction writing. A fair amount of filler chat and humor, but the good episodes are sensational.
* *Screenwriting for Hollywood* by Michael Hauge.
* *Elements of Fiction Writing: Characters & Viewpoint* by Orson Scott Card.
* *The Elements of Style* by William Strunk Jr (note there is an updated 2018 edition that may be better).
* *Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting* by Robert Mckee.
* *Story Selling* (not really about how to write well. It does cover how to use narrative to advertise).
* *On Writing* by Steven King: More for pleasure than study but does have some strong advice.
#inspiration
source
Another article I'd written that may help or motivate.
**Section 1: Reaching Average**
You can rapidly become average at writing, at least functionally. The key is embracing technology. Anyone who has examined job applications before and after AI will know that few people write better than AI, and this is now. AI will improve.
All it takes to write at an average standard is to list the points you want to make, get AI to present these coherently, and then quickly proofread and correct any misunderstood points or blatant errors.
Few people need to write better than this baseline. You can also cheaply outsource any writing that could prove critical, including dating profiles and job applications.
Even if you believe you will never need to become a great writer, we recommend spending five minutes reading the next section.
**Section 2: The Core Rules of Writing**
**Rule 1: Thought matters.**
We recommend you focus your thoughts by asking yourself questions. “Does a particular sentence serve a purpose?” or “What plot elements should you include in a political thriller?”
As thinking is time-consuming, we recommend first asking yourself if what you are writing matters. If it doesn’t, the method described in section 1 is sufficient.
To think through everything, even for a two-word advertising slogan, is time-consuming. For longer pieces, compromise is a requirement. As such, it is crucial to know what to focus on.
When writing something where the quality matters, we suggest you ask yourself or others:
* Are there blatant errors? Bad writing loses people quickly.
* What is the initial Impression my work will make? Many people will immediately stop reading anything that doesn’t make a strong impact.
* Does what I’m writing address its purpose? Common primary purposes of writing include making your audience feel or the quick and professional conveyance of information.
**Rule 2: Aim to make your audience feel as you intend.** To achieve this, you must know which reaction you want.
An everyday email to your boss should convey competence. It should typically be direct, brief, clear, polite, and avoid errors. Almost all great novels evoke wonder; you want your audience to read and think wow, that was a great experience. Most novels will aim to help you empathize with the characters and use this empathy to convey emotions.
**Rule 3: Learn what excellent writing looks like.** It is essential to read writing similar to what you aim to write.
Ideally, you should dissect what you read to evaluate what you might use, why the author made the choices they made, and what the strengths and weaknesses are. If you cannot accurately spot significant flaws in a piece of writing, you will unlikely improve upon it. This skill will also help when you edit and evaluate your own work.
One way to learn this skill is to read analytical writing, ideally writing that analyzes something you have already read, as high-quality reviews should. Another strong method is to examine your writing and, ideally, get feedback.
**Section 3: The Path to Mastery**
It would take more than a lifetime to explain everything a master writer might consider, and most of this information would duplicate the work of others. Instead, we’ve designed this section to teach you how to become a master writer efficiently.
The primary activity to improve your writing is, of course, writing. However, most adults will improve slowly by this method alone. To improve more rapidly, you need to practice purposefully.
If you are unfamiliar with purposeful practice, we strongly recommend the book *Peak* by Anders Ericson and Robert Pool. Briefly, purposeful practice involves thought, ideally thought targeted toward improvement.
For example, when someone learns to type, they are forced to think about the activity. Most adults, however, know how to type well enough that they do not need to think about it. As such, they stop improving. Every adult could improve their typing speed, but few do. This is because they don’t think about their typing. Focus on your typing, and it should improve. Two easy methods to do this are simply typing as fast as you are able or using a website’s typing exercises.
Focus is needed to improve all elements of your writing. This focus doesn’t need to occur as you write; you can achieve it through reviews or feedback. The best way to improve your writing will be to have people of similar or greater skill levels read your writing and discuss the points that arise. Slightly worse but still beneficial is to read the works of others and discuss how to improve. Another worse but easier-to-achieve method is to see what changes AI suggests.
To improve rapidly, we recommend that you first work on writing well in a general sense. As your pace of improvement slows, focus on more specific aspects of this skill, such as grammar, writing rapidly, specificity (using the correct words in a situation), or writing style. Eventually, return to the overarching topic armed with extra knowledge that should help you progress further and continue to delve into each topic in deeper detail. To aid you, we’ve broken writing into its more critical subskills:
Technical skills
* Grammar
* Sentence structure
* Spelling
* Punctuation
* Sentence structure
* Syntax awareness
* Consistency
* Repeated word use
Beautiful/quality writing
* Vocabulary
* Specificity
* Metaphor, alliteration, and simile
* Rhyme and rhythm
* Impact
* Writing style
* Creativity
* Idea generation
* Injecting emotion
Writing with purpose
* Targeting your audience
Writing rapidly
* Typing speed
* Planning (quick tip: it is often easier to write by answering questions)
* Discipline (or time spent writing)
* Breaking tasks into manageable steps
* Time management for deadlines
Editing and review
* Copy editing
* Structural editing
* Cutting unneeded words
* Review
* Generating and using the feedback of others
* Fact-checking and other research
Storytelling
* Character
* Dialog
* Character arcs
* Personality
* Making the audience empathize with your characters
* Internal monolog
* Scenes
* Immersion
* Worldbuilding
* Plot
* Techniques, for example, Show, don’t tell
* Determining which details to include
* Generating intrigue
* Foreshadowing
* Symbolism, themes, and subtext
Business writing
* Speeches
* Teaching others
* Marketing
* Academic writing
Layout
The more times you return to a subject, the more overlap you will experience and the slower you should learn. As such, it is worth confirming that you want to improve further rather than working on another aspect of your life.
While you should often evaluate and attempt to improve all aspects of your writing concurrently, working on specific areas of your craft sometimes makes sense. To work on style, for example, you may rewrite a scene in the plain writing style famously associated with Issac Asimov, in a poetic style, or as a foreigner or aristocrat.
Our next quick point is that you can improve at every writing sub-skill. The main area here that people dispute is creativity. The argument against learning creativity hinges on the belief that creativity is innate. This argument has some merit. Some people develop more or better creative ideas in less time than others. In other words, they are more innovative.
Acknowledging individual differences in starting points, learning rates, and potential limitations, such as age or physique, does not discount the possibility of improvement. Although I could never play in the NBA, I could still significantly enhance my basketball skills; similarly, you can progress in creativity.
**Resources**
In addition to exercises, we’ve suggested the following resources that may be helpful:
* *Stein on Writing* by Sol Stein
* *Writing Excuses*: A podcast that covers almost everything to do with fiction writing. A fair amount of filler chat and humor, but the good episodes are sensational.
* *Screenwriting for Hollywood* by Michael Hauge.
* *Elements of Fiction Writing: Characters & Viewpoint* by Orson Scott Card.
* *The Elements of Style* by William Strunk Jr (note there is an updated 2018 edition that may be better).
* *Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting* by Robert Mckee.
* *Story Selling* (not really about how to write well. It does cover how to use narrative to advertise).
* *On Writing* by Steven King: More for pleasure than study but does have some strong advice.
#inspiration
source
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